Instead, focus on living the healthy, well-fueled and physically active lifestyle that you know you need to lead anyway. By doing that, you'll see far greater results in the arm department, anyway, Mendez says. Through a combination of balanced eating (hit all three macros at every meal!) and performing a combination of high-intensity interval cardio and strength training, you'll naturally shed fat all over, including around your arms, explains Lauren Williams, C.P.T., a trainer at PROJECT Equinox.
Ah, arm fat. You know what it is. And let’s be honest. We all know we shouldn’t make a big deal of such things (all body types are beautiful, after all). But there is still a moment’s hesitation we all face when it comes to donning a cute spaghetti top or sleeveless dress. If there’s one word to describe arm fat, it would have to be stubborn. And no matter how much you control your diet or cut back on dessert, arm fat still seems to stay. Irritating, right? But before figuring out a way to reduce flabby arms muscles, it’s important to know what leads to the accumulation of arm fat.
And perhaps one of the best new findings about exercise — especially if you, like many people, struggle to find the time to fit it into a busy day — is that all those benefits of physical activity can be had even if you only squeeze in a few minutes of exercise a day. While doctors used to think that we needed to engage in 30 to 60 minutes of exercise a day, new research is finding that we can see benefits with shorter bursts of physical activity. “As little as 15 minutes a day of high-intensity activity that leaves you breathless, like swimming, can kick start your metabolic rate and reduce body fat and increase muscle mass,” says Dr. Berger.

1. It strengthens the heart. The heart is a muscle. Like other muscles, its performance improves when it's regularly challenged by exercise. The heart responds to exercise by becoming stronger and more efficient. Strengthening the heart muscle can help ward off heart disease -- the leading cause of death in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- even in early childhood.

Inspired by the idea that we can become harder, better, faster, and stronger using our body alone, we spoke with some of our #TeamAaptiv trainers. With their help, we discovered the most beneficial exercise moves you can do, no equipment required. Tried and true, they’re staples for a reason. If you haven’t already, you’ll want to include these in your routine—even when you get back in the gym.
Plyometrics are high-intensity bodyweight exercises that improve power, speed and physical performance. Think of burpees, jumping jacks, plank jacks and box jumps. These movements engage the whole body and raise your heart rate, sending your metabolism into overdrive. During a typical workout, your muscles are stretched and then contracted quickly to produce explosive force.
What you can do is remove body fat from your entire body. Basically, you have to decrease your overall body fat composition if you want to lose weight from any specific place on your body. When you do that, you are going to eventually target the part of your body you want and you're going to lose body fat there. You can't just do 1000 push-ups every day and lose arm fat. Instead, you have to lose body fat in your entire body while building those arm muscles. You build up those muscles so that when your body fat percentage is low enough, they can show through.
Exercise has long been correlated with a longer life, but it’s only recently started to become clear why this might be. Studies, like a new one in the journal Preventive Medicine which found that exercise is linked to longer caps at the ends of chromosomes, have helped flesh this out a bit more. These caps, called telomeres, naturally shorten as we age, with each cell division. People who live a long time have telomeres that are in better shape than those who don’t—but there’s a lot we can do to affect the rate at which they shorten over the years. The team behind the new study looked at data from CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and found that for people who exercised regularly, their telomeres were 140 base pairs longer on average than sedentary people's. Which correlates to being years “younger” than their sedentary peers.